Re: Why bother with the mark and sweep garbage collection on non-embedded interpreter shutdown?

[mstone]

Slightly off-topic, I recall Dennis Ritchie talking about the Plan9 garbage collection system, which (IIRC) balanced a fairly aggressive reference counter against a very mellow mark-and-sweep system. The basic idea was that the ref counter would do most of the heavy lifting, with the mark-and-sweep system getting rid of the rare loop before too awfully long.